A Dictionary of Atong

A Tibeto-Burman Language of Northeast India and Bangladesh

Seino van Breugel

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110718072
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Atong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Northeast India and Bangladesh. In this dictionary, Seino van Breugel provides a rigorous, well-illustrated and well-referenced lexical description of the language, making this book of great interest and value to general linguists, typologists, as well as area specialists and cultural anthropologists. Comprising not only of an Atong-English, but also an English-Atong dictionary, as well as semantic lexica, this volume is one of the most thorough lexical descriptions of a Bodo-Garo language to date. The grammatical lexica allow the reader quick access to lists of members of the various Atong word classes, collocations and idiomatic expressions. The grammatical compendium makes this book self-contained, while its many references link it to the rest of the author's corpus on the Atong language. The appendix of photos not only provides visual illustrations to many of the Atong dictionary entries, but also offers the reader a glance at the physical environment in which the language is spoken.

PART 1: ATONG – ENGLISH DICTIONARY

What do we see in the Atong-English dictionary?

When we read the Atong-English dictionary, we see that there are words in bold face, followed by an abbreviation in italics. The words in bold face are called the headwords. A headword and its related text, which explains, translates and exemplifies the use of the headword, is called an entry. Entries start at the margin of the text. Following a headword is an abbreviation in italics, which indicates what type of headword it is, or what word class the headword belongs to. The list of abbreviations can be found in the prologue.

Each word in Atong belongs to a certain word class, and each word class has different grammatical properties. This information is not important if you just want to know the spelling or translation of a word; it is only important if you are interested in the grammar of Atong. Word classes and their grammatical properties are explained in the book A Grammar of Atong (van Breugel 2014), which was mentioned above, in the introduction.

When the headword is a noun, indicated by the abbreviation n., we can see that there is another abbreviation in CAPITAL LETTERS following the abbreviation n.. This abbreviation in capitals indicates the semantic domain of the noun. Semantic domain has to do with the meaning of the noun. This is particularly useful when there are two nouns with the same spelling but different meanings, for example:

bytym n. ABSTR. a good smell

bytym n. CORP/FOOD. fat (of human or animal), grease

The first noun is an abstract noun (ABSTR), which is translated as ‘a good smell’; whereas the second noun has to do with the a substance produced by the body of a human or animal (CORP), or with food (FOOD), and can be translated as ‘fat (of human or animal)’ or ‘grease’. This word can be used to refer to fat on the body of a human or animal, and can also be used to refer to fat or grease used in the preparation of food, or as the ingredient of certain dishes.

Some entries in the dictionary have sub-entries. Subentries also have headwords in bold face. These sub-entry headwords are related to one or more major entries. Subentries do not start at the margin, but are in line with the indentation of the rest of the text belonging to the headword of the main entry. Consider the entry of the word si- ‘to starve’:

Figure 1: Example of a heading with a sub-heading.

The headword si- starts at the margin. The entry has a sub-entry, viz. kha•thong si- ‘to feel pity’, which does not start at the margin, but has the same indentation as the rest of the text belonging to the main-entry headword si-.

When collocations (see PART 5, §5) are attested in the same phrase, i.e. directly next to one another, they are considered to be kathajyksai⁵ ‘married words’. Kathajyksai are presented as headwords in the dictionary, with the abbreviation khjyks, as well as with an indication of their word class, as for example:

gam jym khjyks, n. wealth, riches, fortune

Collocations of which the member words are not attested in juxtaposition, or of which the constituent words are only attested marked separately (by phrasal enclitics) are not given a separate entry in the dictionary, but are presented as sub-entries with the words that form the collocation, as is the case with the collocation song... nok..., as we can see in the following example, which is the complete entry of the headword song. The same collocation will also occur as a sub-entry with the headword nok ‘house’. As we can see, the words that make up the collocation are followed by an ellipsis ‘...’, to indicate that they are attested in separate phrases, each with their own phrasal marking, or in separate, but juxtaposed, clauses.

Headwords can be preceded by an equal sign ‘=’ or a hyphen ‘-’, are bound morphemes, which means that they do not occur as separate words in a sentence, but are rather attached to some other word. For example, the headword =cha, which indicates negative polarity on predicates, can be used in sa•=cha (eat=neg) ‘don’t/doesn’t eat’ and -gak, which is an event specifier meaning ‘accidentally’ can be used in sa•-gak=ok (eat-accidentally=cos) ‘has/have accidentally eaten.

Figure 2: Example of a sub-heading for a collocation.

Headwords with an equal sign are called enclitics (see van Breugel 2014: 257 and 386 for definitions). Their meaning or function is given in brackets after the abbreviation indicating their headword type. After the brackets, there is a full stop. This configuration separates the grammatical information from the translations and examples. The entry of the imperative enclitic =bo, is illustrative.

=bo encl.(imperative modality). Sa•bo! Eat!

If an enclitic has several distinct functions or interpretations, these are then numbered as, as in entry of the locative enclitic.

=chi₁ encl. (locative). (1) marks Spatial Locations. (2) marks Temporal Locations. (3) marks Temporal Location Clauses. (4) marks Conditional Clauses.

Most of the enclitics cannot be translated with just one word in English. In these cases, when the reader wants to know their exact meaning, it can be found in van Breugel (2014: 257–268, 324–348 and 386–415).

Headwords preceded by a hyphen are suffixes (see van Breugel 2014: 369–375). As with the enclitics mentioned above, the meaning or function of a suffix is given in brackets after the abbreviation indicating their headword type, e.g. the reciprocal suffix -ruk, whose dictionary entry looks like this:

-ruk sfx. (reciprocal). Na•nange song jan•rukok. Our villages are very far apart from each other.

Verbs are presented in their root form,⁶ and followed by a hyphen.⁷ The root form is the form of the verb without any suffixes or enclitics, for example:

sa•- v. to eat

The hyphen means that the root is usually followed by another meaningful part: a suffix or enclitic; as in:

sa•bo	<sa•=bo>	(eat=imp)
sa•manok	<sa•-man=ok>	(eat-already=cos)
sa•thokok	<sa•-thok=ok>	(eat-everyone=cos)
sa•chaka	<sa•=cha=ka>	(eat=neg=ift)
sa•khuni	<sa•=khu=ni>	(eat=more=unc)
sa•ak	<sa•=ak>	(eat=cos)
etc.

In this dictionary, whether a verb is transitive or intransitive is only indicated for very few verbs, the reasons being that many verbs are ambitransitive, and the valency of many other verbs is not know with certainty. For more information, the reader is referred to van Breugel...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations of grammatical categories
• List of abbreviations of types of headword
• Labels for the semantic domains of nouns in the Atong-English dictionary
• PART 1: ATONG – ENGLISH DICTIONARY
• PART 2: ENGLISH – ATONG DICTIONARY
• PART 3: SEMANTIC LEXICA
• PART 4: GRAMMATICAL LEXICA
• PART 5: COMPENDIUM OF ATONG GRAMMAR
• Index